Read Online Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer - Free Book Online

See the sand and flies of the world, he said. He was married, but his wife was staying in their house near Aldershot until it became clear how long his battalion was going to be abroad. He had two daughters, of nine and twelve.
    ‘I’d like to meet your family,’ Dee said. ‘What’s your wife’s name?’
    He smiled. ‘Sarah. She’s not like you,’ he added.
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘Unspoiled.’
    ‘She is?’
    ‘You are.’
    The band played ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ and they found themselves dancing rather close, his face against her hair, her own cheek against his chest. ‘Damien,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think so.’
    He moved perceptibly away. ‘No, I suppose not.’
    Binty was watching, she knew that. Paula was in the cabin, being babysat by the ever-willing Marjorie, Tom was a thousand miles away at his boarding school and Edward was a thousand miles in the other direction, but Binty was watching. When the band finished, she and Damien went out on deck for a breath of fresh air. He held her hand. She felt bewildered and slightly light-headed. ‘I must go and relieve Marjorie,’ she told him. ‘Really, I must go.’
    ‘Of course,’ he agreed, and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek before releasing her.
    *
    The next day the ship hove to in a flat calm. There was a church service on deck, with the chaplain of one of the battalions officiating. The headland away to port in the heat haze was Cape Trafalgar. Flags fluttered overhead, the famous signal that the
Victory
had flown on that October day in 1805 – England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty – while the band played ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ and hundreds of voices, male voices, were raised up to the enamelled turquoise sky:
Eternal Father, strong to save
    Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
    Who bids the mighty ocean deep
    Its own appointed limits keep
    Wreaths were dropped overboard for the dead, and Dee felt ridiculously proud as she watched them float away on the gelatinous surface, proud that figures out of history – Lord Nelson pale and sensitive, Hardy tall and noble, hundreds of ordinary seamen with their tarred pigtails – could be real to men and women one hundred and fifty years later. This was the glory of the British, she felt. There were things that were disgraceful, things that her father quite rightly railed against; but not this. She saw Damien down on the lower deck with his men, looking fine in the uniform of his regiment, and she felt proud for him and a little guilty.
    During the night they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Dee woke Paula so that they could look out across the black sea to the lights of Tangiers on one side and Algeciras on the other. By the next morning they were in the open sea once more, and memory of that narrow passage was no more than a half-remembered dream. While Paula squealed with delight they watched dolphins sliding through the water like knives andflying fish darting like thrown daggers. The soldiers had rifle practice down on their deck, firing at targets thrown astern of the ship. The sound of gunfire was flat and abrupt, puny against the huge space of sky and sea.
    Heat came gradually, in the ship’s stately progress eastwards down the Mediterranean. The heat increases going south and going east, that’s what Damien told her. It seemed obvious about going south, but why should heat increase going east? ‘Because you’re heading towards the Orient,’ had been his reply.
    ‘But that’s no answer. It’s just a word.’
    ‘Typical Sheffield, always wanting literal reasons. Doesn’t Orient
sound
hot? Isn’t that good enough? Doesn’t it sound hot and exotic, full of rich scents and strange flavours? But don’t ask me why.’
    So she expected the heat, even if she couldn’t explain it – but not quite the oppression of it, the damp beneath her arms, the insidious trickle of sweat between her breasts, the thin layer of moisture that